The Trump campaign is making outlandish predictions about how the president will perform with Hispanic and Latino voters as Joe Biden plays catch-up in expanding his outreach to them.
But experts say that the result of the election is not a matter of whether Hispanic and Latino voters dramatically shift to supporting the president, but whether the Democratic presidential nominee can increase turnout among the emerging portion of the electorate.
“President Trump will get over 40% of the Latino vote,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said Tuesday.
The backup for his prediction: an Emerson College national poll released that day that found Trump had 37% support from Hispanic voters while Biden had 60% support. The poll, which overall found 49% support for Biden and 47% support for Trump, was conducted Aug. 30-31 with 1,567 voters, about half of which were contacted via landlines and half online, with a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
A scenario with Trump receiving that share of the Latino vote is “impossible,” according to Gabe Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico and a principal at opinion research firm Latino Decisions, which contracts with the Biden campaign.
“I really don’t see President Trump doing anywhere better than 25% or so of Latino voters,” Sanchez told the Washington Examiner.
“The last time a Republican presidential candidate got roughly 40% of the Latino vote was President George W. Bush, and that was a much different political climate,” Sanchez told the Washington Examiner. “He was much more friendly and favorable toward Latinos.”
His group’s latest national survey of Latinos in August found Trump at 24% support among Latino voters versus 66% for Biden. Exit polls in 2016 found that Trump received 28% support from Latino voters.
The Trump campaign’s 40% figure, while it may be political posturing, likely did not come out of thin air. It could be related to the threshold of 15% of black male voters for Trump that would make it hard for the Biden campaign to win the election.
“If a Republican can get more than 30% of the Latino vote, Latinx vote, that Republican begins to thread the Democratic candidate,” said David McCuan, the political science chairman at Sonoma State University. “If they get more than 35%, it’s darn difficult. So hitting that magic number of 40% would assure that if you weren’t going to get [15%] for African American males, but you did for Latinos, Latinx voters, that’s a big deal.”
The important figure is not the aggregate national support number, but how many Latino voters will turn up at the polls and whether Biden’s campaign can increase that turnout.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien argued that Biden is failing in this respect, saying that the Trump campaign has a “very impressive ground game” in Miami, Florida — a key Electoral College swing state. He argued Biden has a “failing grassroots strategy with Latino voters” and that he carries baggage from former President Barack Obama’s policies on Cuba that turn many Cuban Americans off.
That, Sanchez said, could be part of Trump’s strategy to suppress the Latino vote there.
Coronavirus restrictions may harm Biden in that they may suppress turnout in Nevada. Latino voters who work on the Las Vegas strip often vote at polling places in the same building as where they work, and restrictions on capacity resulting in fewer workers are likely to depress turnout, McCuan said.
Biden released a plan on how to “empower the Latino community” early last month, which some critics thought was far too late for the campaign to acknowledge a rapidly growing portion of the electorate. In December 2019, his senior Latina adviser resigned out of frustration that the campaign was not doing enough to reach that community.
The importance of the Latino vote was partly what sunk California Rep. Karen Bass’s chances of becoming Biden’s running mate. Comments that she made praising former communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro resurfaced in the final weeks before Biden’s selection.
But Sanchez said that Biden is making the right investments. The campaign is “spending a lot more money on capturing the Latino electorate, both in terms of their direct outreach as well as research,” he said, adding that the Latino Decisions polling team is “doing way more work” for Biden than what they did for 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Biden’s team is looking beyond states traditionally thought of as having many Hispanic and Latino voters, such as Florida and Southwestern states, and focusing on getting voters in other swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Sanchez said.
Trump, though, is not going out without a fight. His campaign outspent Biden on Spanish language television ads in July.
“One of the things that we’ve consistently found in our research is even for English-dominant Latinos, when they see campaign ads in Spanish, it has a positive effect because they perceive, ‘Okay the candidate cares about our community,’” Sanchez said.
